LB 1045 

Y7 
[Copy 1 



THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO 

FODNDED BY JOHN D. ROCE S P E i. LE R 



The Decennial Publications 



SCIENTIFIC METHOD IN EDUCATION 

BY 

ELLA FLAGG YOUNG 



The Decennial Publications 

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THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO 



FOUNDED BY 



JS D. ROCK 1 1 'I 1 1.1 K 



The Decennial Publications 



SCIENTIFIC METHOD IN EDUCATION 



ELLA FLAGG YOUNG 

PBOFE9SOE OF EDUCATION 



PRINTED FROM VOLUME III 



CHICAGO 
THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO 
1903 



.Y7 




Copyright 1903 

BY THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO 



PRINTED MAY 1, 1903 



SCIENTIFIC METHOD IN EDUCATION 

Ella Flagg Young 

Science cannot complain of neglect by modern society. Her methods, her dis- 
coveries, her inventions, are greeted with appreciative applause. Even her terminology, 
technical and complicated as it may be, is rapidly absorbed into the popular phrase- 
ology of the day. In truth, scientific terms often supply for many a speaker, befogged 
in his own rhetoric, a happy explanation of the complex and problematical, and a short 
cut to the conclusion of a controversy. This ready use of the language of science is 
not, however, all gain, for the very ease with which scientific terms are made to do 
service helps obscure those implications which are vital to the subject. 

So rapidly do new terms crystallize into symbols for that which is explicit only, 
that the implicit elements soon cease to be included in the meaning of the symbols. 
In this tendency toward a limitation of the meaning of a comprehensive term, a 
remarkable retroaction sets in ; for that which is ignored because not expressed, there 
is substituted a phase of traditional belief which the new, rightly understood, negates. 
This substitution is well illustrated in the application of the theory of evolution. That 
great theory of life implies more than mere continuity or succession — something like 
growth or definite change from form to form under the action of immutable laws '■ — 
" laws of nature." The ideas involved in the term the " laws of nature " have not 
received the attention and thought which would give to the popular mind a compre- 
hension of their full significance ; but the change which may be effected in opposition 
to conditions which would obtain if the species were immutable is accepted as possible 
and supposed to include the natural forces acting in inducing modifications. Having 
ejected immutable from the conception of species, the ready recipient of new scientific 
terms rushes on to the conclusion that nothing in the being is immutable, hence the 
immutability is in an external force. The result is a re-establishment of the concep- 
tion of external causation, and a change induced by an external force. 

It would be a delicate task to attempt a comparison of the retarding influence of 
opposition to the acceptance of a great theory of life, and the reactionary tendency in 
a ready acceptance based 'on a misconception of those conditions which are implied. 
Tradition is an effective factor in making human society stable. It is active in both 
attitudes toward the new, but with this difference: in that of opposition, it is a recog- 
nized authority; in that of ready acceptance, it is an unseen power supposed to be 
deposed when in reality it is merely in a new dress. 

Few minds are competent to weigh the meaning of that which has been handed 
down with the meaning of that which is animated by the new spirit. The incompetency 

' Wallace, " Evolution," The Progress of the Century, p. 4. 

143 



Scientific Method in Education 



lies not so much in the inability to note the facts involved as in the lack of scientific 
method in interpreting the underlying principles. The failure to search for and find 
an hypothesis that makes the life-process basic results in long-continued efforts to 
include the traditional in the new theory, for tradition deals with facts, not with prin- 
ciples. Pressed for an explanation of the significance of evolution, the advocate who 
accepts facts without searching for the underlying law falls back upon Darwin's 
Descent of Man, gathering it up in three words: monkey, evolution, man. There is 
the poor monkey, then the law of evolution seizing him and molding him whether he 
will or no, and at last man, the outcome of that mighty force working on monkey. 
It is this reduction of the history of man to that of a unit of a given type, acted upon 
by an external force and transformed into a new type that gives rise to the question, 
Why do not monkeys continue to become men? The effective force is to the popular 
mind very like the jackknife in the transformation of a goose-quill into a pen. 

Juggling with theories which have been so long accepted as to take on the 
authority of established truth is not peculiar to the popular mind. Philosophers and 
scientists have through like confusion retarded the advance of new ideas. It is not, 
therefore, strange that teachers and writers on education have halted on the same 
plane with them, and defined the new in scientific terms freshly coined but with the 
old significations embodied therein. 

It is needless to state that the misconception of evolution which established 
external causation in full control of the monkey has been equally active in the gen- 
erally accepted theories of the education of the human being. Naturally, it was 
agreed that the force which was effective in the evolution of the species must be 
effective in the development of the individual. That is sound doctrine, but when its 
advocates proceed to interpret without investigating, to rehabilitate old notions which 
the investigation would show hostile to the new, the soundness counts for little in the 
outcome. Although "development" is a word to conjure with in educational circles, 
the men and women who use it substitute, as a rule, external causation for the law of 
nature; and change induced by action of the external power, for growth through the 
activity of nature working in accord with its unchanging law. 

The great advance of science which has brought the modern world to her feet, 
has been due to a habit of mind that subjects all facts to an impartial, sympathetic 
investigation called scientific. The attitude of the scientist is that of the intel- 
ligent seeker after truth. This attitude cannot be taken by one whose premises 
are false, or whose conclusions are biased by individual likes and dislikes. Scientific 
method is the method, the attitude of mind, that makes a search for the principle 
under which facts observed may be explained in their relations and made significant. 
The principle or "natural law" sought is a statement or formulation worked out by 
the scientific imagination in getting at the relations and meanings of conditions and 
sequences observed. It is a law controlling the procedure of the investigator and the 
practitioner. "We should hold fast to it until either the results to which it leads 

144 



Ella Flagg Young 



involve us in contradictions, or until some other truth becomes plain to us, from which 
we are able to understand how a proposition, now seen to be false, came to present the 
appearance of a self-evident truth.''- When the workers in every branch of modern 
society began to advocate method in their particular field, it was to be expected that 
method would be applied to the problems of education, and it was. Educational 
method has, however, disclaimed the name of science, and rightly too. It started with 
the expressed aim of setting conditions that would be conducive to the development of 
the child according to the law of its being. Its terms have been those of evolution 
and development, but its meanings have been the meanings of pre-Darwinian times. 
With the magnification of the teacher as the external force, whose chief office was 
to prepare the nutritious food in layers so that it should be taken in accord with the 
determined laws of nature, there has been a steady growth of non-scientific methods 
in the schools. To plan and conduct a recitation so that the learner shall neither 
hesitate nor stumble have become the alpha and omega of so-called educational 
method. 

Incredible as it may seem, on the one hand, the intellectual world exalts the sim- 
plicity and learning, the appreciation and acumen that characterize scientific method; 
on the other hand, it accepts the complexity and pedantry, the depreciation and slow- 
ness of perception that characterize educational methods, and decries method in edu- 
cation instead of condemning that educational method which is not scientific. It 
is but a few years since the president of Columbia University referred to "the 
machine methods and dull, uninspiring class exercises of our average academy." 3 

What are the ideas which are fundamental in the present-day conception of the 
development of the human being? What are the conditions and sequences observed, 
and what the relations and meanings given them by the scientific imagination of the 
student of the theory and art of education? The first condition posited by the veriest 
tyro in thinking on development is the same that is stated by the educational philos- 
opher to be " the great central fact to be kept in view in the study of mind — self- 
activity." 4 The second condition is an environment that furnishes opportunities for 
the use of potential powers. " Only a self can be educated .... a being which is 
through itself, and not one that is made by surrounding conditions." 5 Theorists in 
education and teachers not only accept the conditions set by Dr. Harris as funda- 
mental, but very generally express themselves in the same terms that he uses. 

It is difficult in a few lines to enter into a discussion of the sequences resulting 
from the interconnection of the activity, called the human being, and the environment, 
natural and social. Necessarily they appear in two sets : first, the subjective sequences 
— sensations, images, and ideas which the activity develops out of the stimuli in the 
environment ; second, the objective sequences — bodily and facial expressions, gestural 

sLotze, Logic (translated by Bosanquet), Vol. II, * Harris, Psychologic Foundations of Education, p 23. 

3 Bctler, " Is there a New Education? " The Meaning 
of Education, pp. 76, 77. 



Scientific Method in Education 



and verbal language, art and utilitarian productions, through which the self-active 
being makes itself known to the world. It is by observation of the second, the objec- 
tive, sequences that the desired information about the subjective sequences of another 
being is obtained. The scientific imagination can get at the relations and meanings 
of the subjective data, in so far as it interprets and unifies the objective in a coherent 
whole. 

To this position, as indicative of a demand for a knowledge of psychology on the 
part of every teacher, some psychologists would seem to take exception ; but a careful 
reading of all they have written on the question shows them fearful that the machines 
of the experimental-psychological laboratory may become a part of the equipment of the 
schoolroom, and the theories of the speculating psychologist be incorporated in the 
educational theory of the teacher of boys and girls. 6 I know of no psychologist of 
recognized standing who dissents from the opinion that there are some psychological 
conceptions which should be a part of the mental equipment of the teacher. 7 In all 
walks and stations in social life we meet persons not supposed to have either a well- 
developed scientific imagination or an interest in the conceptions of psychology, and 
yet who evidence the possession in a high degree of the power of observation of the 
objective signs, and of interpretation of the subjective data from which their significance 
is derived ; and also a scientific imagination which evaluates and unifies the activities of 
the person observed. The expressions in which they sum up their failure to construct 
a satisfying, coherent being behind the mental phenomena are familiar — "I can't 
understand him; his ways are too much for me ;" "I can explain to my satisfaction 
everything she has done thus far, but I have no idea as to what she will do next." 
These homely remarks are repeated, to remind the reader of the almost general 
possession of the gift to read the meanings of the acts of others and to project their 
future acts. 

It must be conceded, however, that in observation of the development of mind 
there is not so general power. It is possible that the doctrine of original sin has made 
it more difficult to grasp the idea of development as a growth of inherent tendencies in 
the case of man than in the case of animals and plants. Many approach the 
study of a developing mind with the accepted formula that it is by inhibition of its 
natural tendencies and the substitution of other modes of activity that mind grows. 
No one would attempt to repress the action of the law of its nature in a kitten or a 
hyacinth bulb and expect a normal cat or plant. As one's conception of the native 
equipment of the human being, and the development of the impulses 8 and instinctive 
tendencies becomes clear and definite, there is a comprehension of the idea of the order 
of growth in power within the subjective sequences. 

In educational method there is a common mistake which originates in the percep- 
tion that the fact or perceptual phase of an object or action is more apparent to a child 

6 MDnsterderg, Psychology and Education, Psychol- ' James, Talks to Teachers, I. 

ogy and Life. 8 Dewet, The Study of Ethics, chap, iii, sees, ix-xii. 



Ella Flagg Young 



than is the truth or conceptual phase. The resulting mistake lies in the teaching of 
children in the kindergarten and the primary grades as if the percept were developed 
in advance of the concept. If the method were psychologic in its premises a concep- 
tion of the development of the percept and concept together would be active instead 
of the perception only. Reflection on Baldwin's second element in attention 9 shows 
easily the beginnings of conceptual activity in the earliest movements of mind. 

Educational method has ever recognized attention as the cardinal virtue in the 
school. It has not, however, defined it as " a function of organization, a function which 
grows with the growth of knowledge, reflects the state of knowledge, holds in its own 
integrity the system of data already organized in experience." 10 It has defined atten- 
tion as concentration only, and that as concentration upon a presentation rather than 
concentration of the selected data c£ the presentation and the data of experience. It 
has been so oblivious to the unifying activity of attention as to suggest among " exer- 
cises for the culture of attention : spelling, by having each child in succession name 
one letter of the word ; pronouncing sentences or lists of unrelated words, and having 
children reproduce them orally and in writing." 11 The narrow idea of attention 
embodied in the " suggestions " brings forward the cause of more than half the dulness 
and inability in children to understand the subject of the recitation ; it is the non- 
recognition of the difference in the dominant types of imagery in children who are of 
a different type from that provided for by the author of the method, or that of the 
teacher. This, however, is not the place for an exposition of the specific lines in which 
educational methods have failed because of their narrow range and unscientific attitude. 

Educational method to be of worth should be scientific method applied to the art 
of teaching. The method of the teacher is simply an attitude of mind like that of the 
scientist. There are two elements involved, the learning mind and the subject-matter 
or environment. To have an intimate acquaintance with each, to appreciate the expect- 
ant longing of mind, to interpret its responses to stimuli, to form valid conceptions of 
the activity and assimilating power of each child in the environment made by the 
subject, is to have a method in teaching which covers the entire range of that great 
art. It is to have the method of science applied to education. This means that the 
teacher should have a method applicable to every subject, in every division of the school 
beginning with the kindergarten and extending through the graduate school. A dis- 
tinct method for every subject is not necessary any more than a special scientific method 
for each branch of science would be necessary. Whatever be the subject one is teach- 
ing the aim is identical with that of all other subjects taught : to determine how mind 
is working with the material in its environment, what nourishment it is selecting and 
assimilating. 

The two elements involved cannot be passed by with so slight attention as is given 
by specifying them as children and subject-matter. To teach children necessitates 

'Baldwin, Mental Development in the Child and the w Idem, Development and Evolution, p. 252. 

Race, chap, xi, sec. 2. „ Systematic Methodology, p. 95. 



8 Scientific Method in Education 

a knowledge of the method of mind, the laws of mental activity which are invariable 
in normal beings — but there is no word which the modern teacher in the elementary 
school fears more than law thus applied. This fear rests largely upon the interpreta- 
tion given the meaning of natural law. With a vivid recollection of the logical method 
of the schools in the past, a method which imposed upon the child and the student the 
summing up of the adult's conclusions, it has come about that law of mind refers to 
this logical order, that is, that the term is used in the juridical sense. Because there 
has been a misunderstanding about the meaning of the law of the mental life or of 
mental activity, it does not follow that we must be so restricted as to forego forever the 
use of the word as well as ignore the idea for which it stands. We might illustrate 
this in the formation of habit: If children try to form certain habits because of a feeling 
of obligation which has been reasoned out — possibly on the ground that it is their 
duty to get from the teacher all they can because their parents are trying to give them 
an education, or because the teacher is put over them and therefore is superior to 
them — then attention to the formation of habits is the result of obedience to parental 
or school law. On the other hand, if the material which they have in mind and their 
interests cause them to attend to the various stimuli coming from the object, and 
repeat the responses until they are easy, automatic, then the children are following the 
law of their being and the attention is given and the habit formed because of obedi- 
ence to natural law. Only a Rousseau would say that because the principle of habit 
has been, and still is, generally misunderstood as regards its mode of action, mind 
should be developed without acquiring habits. 

The teacher with the grasp of the subject-matter and a knowledge of the laws 
that underlie mental activity and growth has, as has been suggested before, this end 
in view: to keep track of the way in which the different minds in the class act upon 
the stimuli presented. If images and ideas germane to the subject, but not neces- 
sarily involved in the perceptions which mind constructs at the first blush, are not pro- 
jected by the motor activity of attention into the stream of consciousness, then the 
teacher knows that the stimuli are not stimulating, or that old presentations did not 
become a part of the capital of the children. Much has been written on the subject of 
the value of educational psychology to the teacher of mathematics, reading, history, or 
languages, both pro and con. Great emphasis has been thrown upon the merits of 
the born teacher, and very properly too. Speaking from the standpoint of the science 
of education, the born teacher is one who has an inherent tendency to observe 
and interpret the activity of mind in the early stages of its growth. This inherent 
tendency gives command of a large amount of unclassified data, just as the interest 
of the child in animals or plants gives an absolutely necessary accumulation of 
material with which to proceed in the study of pure science, the pure science of botany 
or zoology. As one does not become a botanist or zoologist by beginning with the 
principles and data of pure science, so one cannot understand the life-process of the 
soul if there be no original observation of the activity of mind preceding the study of 

148 



Ella Flagg Young 



psychology. As in the other sciences, the purely scientific study must be followed by 
a return to such material as formed the basis of observation and experience in the first 
stage, so in psychology the applied science must follow the pure science. 

In the study of psychology the teacher must go through three stages: first, the 
observational and introspective ; second, the purely scientific and experimental ; third, 
the applied, which is generally termed educational psychology. He does not go 
through the third, he enters into it. Unfortunately, many who have passed through 
the first two stages, although they are teachers, do not advance into the third. The 
majority try to pass from the first to the third, omitting the second. It is the failure 
of the first class to pass into the third stage and the omission of the second stage by 
the second class that lie at the bottom of the mistaken reasoning of both classes con- 
cerning the methods of the primary grades. It is not difficult for one with an agree- 
able personality to command the attention of children between the ages of five and ten 
years by means of a stimulus emanating from that agreeable personality ; this possi- 
bility has developed a method which might be termed the kindergarten and primary 
method. It gives certain uniform results without friction. 

It is not uncommon to hear the philosophical psychologist who lacks a thorough- 
going acquaintance with educational psychology say that the primary grades are 
taught intelligently and successfully, but the grammar grades are not taught satisfac- 
torily. It is not unusual to hear the teacher of young children, the teacher destitute 
of the knowledge of the pure science of psychology, say that she loves to teach young 
children, that they learn so much more easily when in the primary grades of work 
than in the grammar grades. 

A supervising teacher of drawing in a system of city schools expressed himself 
very forcibly one day to the principal of one of the large grammar schools in that 
city. They had both been in one of the primary rooms of the principal's school. 
Upon leaving the room the supervisor said : " I cannot understand your tolerating 
such mediocre work in the lower grades when you have such superior work in the 
upper grades." The principal replied by asking which the supervisor considered the 
best grade in that school. The supervisor answered: " The eighth is the best," and 
added: " As regards merit, the work goes down hill in regular order from the eighth to 
the first." The principal then said: " Supposing you reverse your statement and begin 
by mentioning the poorest grade, will you then say the poorest is the first or lowest, 
and the grades improve in regular order as they ascend from the lowest to the high- 
est?" The supervisor, after glowering for a few moments in thought, said: "Yes, I 
should be willing to say that, but it indicates a wrong condition ; the work should be 
excellent all along the line." The principal assented, adding, " provided the standard 
of excellence for each grade is correct." Later on the principal said : " I wish you would 
think of the four best primary departments in drawing that you supervise." After a 
few moments the supervisor said: "I have them in mind." The principal then 
remarked: "I will tell you something about the grammar departments in those four 

149 



10 Scientific Method in Education 



schools ; not one of them ranks among your fifteen best grammar departments." The 
supervisor was indignant, and accused the principal of having listened to gossip about 
the work of the drawing department. The principal said: "I do not know which 
schools you have in mind. I base my statement on an understanding of educational 
method. If those children we saw in the lower room had been indifferent, unrespon- 
sive to the material supplied by the teacher, I should say they were not growing men- 
tally in that environment. If the teacher had dictated the drawing of the lines so that 
their seeing was largely auditory, or if she had drawn for them so that their seeing 
was largely through her eyes, even though the results had been excellent repro- 
ductions, I should say that the natural law of mental development was unknown to 
her, and that the children were not doing good work. As it was, each child was 
intent on seeing for himself the group of objects and producing on paper a sketch of 
what he saw. The teacher was working on the evidences which each child gave of 
his seeing power, and of his power to co-ordinate the eye and the hand, the image and 
its expression. Judged by my standard the work was excellent; the dictation for each 
child was from within ; the criticism was based on the understanding by the teacher of 
the within activity, as shown by the drawing. Judged by your standard it was a fail- 
ure; the results should have been strikingly uniform, and more like those of advanced 
pupils ; but the insurmountable difficulty in that kind of work is the exorbitant price 
paid by the children for their early acquisition, for that which would gratify your and 
their teacher's vanity. The plasticity of the nervous system, a distinguishing char- 
acteristic of the human being, is ignored, and humanity is reduced to the level of the 
bee and the bird with their equipment of instincts." 

In this explanation was an interpretation of the meaning of development in har- 
mony with the idea of law in evolution. The terms were (a) children equipped with 
impulses to act on stimuli in their physical and social environments, (6) the inherent 
impulses and tendencies of each child working on an environment which necessitated 
refining and defining the tendencies ; (c) children growing in command of themselves 
and their environment. The law of nature was understood as originating in the 
spontaneity of each child, and the activity as resulting in something stronger and 
better than that which acted at the beginning, and which was an enlargement of 
experience. 

Knowledge of the individual is not based on those data alone which are obtained 
by study of him at the beginning and end of a given series of acts. There are other 
data: the images and general notions which work in the process of thought, their clear- 
ness, their growth in complexity ; the habit of mind, its quality, that is, its rigidity 
or its flexibility ; the attention, the way in which it moves as it searches for and com- 
bines facts; the judgment, its dependence or independence. The first element, the 
children, necessitates a readiness on the part of the teacher in interpreting the 
contents of mind, clear vision as to their method, and a sympathetic understanding of 
general conditions which are indicated not only by language expression, but also by 

150 



Ella Flagg Young 11 



bodily expression. For the parent this may be enough of the psychological element, 
but for the teacher there must be the scientist's acquaintance with the life-process of 
the human being. This is necessary for a classification of data in accord with the 
principle of growth. 

The second element involved in teaching is the subject-matter. There should be 
an acquaintance with this which has been obtained by the psychologic method, that is, 
through investigation, through observation of sequences, and also by the logical' 2 
method, that is, through making conscious standards, or norms, of the ends toward 
which the psychological material points. The two aspects of a subject gained by these 
two lines of approach put a person in command of what may be called the method of 
the subject. 

It is safe to say that since the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species, every 
subject within the wide domain of knowledge has been reviewed and revised from a 
new standpoint, and presented anew to the world. Foremost in this new approach to 
science, art, and literature, is the effort to co-ordinate the development of the science, 
the theory, or the art with the evolution of the race. The fact that one is not consid- 
ered a scholar in his chosen subject unless he knows something about the beginnings 
of the attack of the human mind upon it, and can trace the gradual rise of the race in 
acquaintance with it and control of it, shows easily how much broader and better fitted 
is the scholar of today to teach his subject than was the scholar of yesterday. One of 
the causes of surprise among the unscholarly is the simplicity with which the erudite man 
talks upon his speciality; it is he that knows only a limited section of his subject 
who is restricted to the technical vocabulary and the single point of view. The sim- 
plicity of the scholar's standpoint indicates the necessity for a broad scholarship on the 
part of the teacher. Unless the teacher knows the progressive growth of the subject- 
matter, it is impossible that the material with which he deals in the recitation shall be 
the images and ideas of the members of the class. 

The assertion is made sometimes, that the theory of evolution naturally and rightly 
throws the emphasis upon method rather than upon fact. Undoubtedly in former times 
too great stress was laid on fact. To differentiate method and fact so that the emphasis 
shall be thrown upon either, to the neglect of the other, is to continue the errors of the 
past. It is highly probable that writers on evolution who assert that the significant 
question is one of method rather than fact do not mean to separate, to divorce, the 
two ; but, having made the positive assertion, they force themselves to desert the post 
of the scientist. The same may be said of teachers and writers on education who say 
the significant question in education is how children learn and not what they learn. If 
mind learns the new by the functioning of that which it has learned before then it must 
be most important that the old be not only true, but have a working, a functioning, 
value also. One who says the aim of the teacher is to discover the method of the grow- 
ing mind, must make the explanation that the material and its assimilation in the 

12 Dewey, unpublished lectures on logic. 

151 



12 Scientific Method in Education 

past are always indicated in the attack at the present moment; tins shows the fact side 
of the lesson to be as important as the method side. On the other hand, that idea of 
educational method which would make the material of the teacher the percepts, images, 
concepts, and judgments of the learner would require so intimate an acquaintance with 
the subject-matter as to make unconscious a close following of its development. 13 It is 
generally dangerous to make use of analogies between the mind and the body, yet it 
is safe here to parallel the two. No one would be so rash as to claim that it makes no 
difference what food a child has, that the only question is how does its stomach attack 
the food. If the digestive apparatus that once functioned well becomes unable to make 
the food into chyme, chyle, and blood, we know that the food in the past has not 
contained elements nutritious for that child. 

There are other directions in which evolution has contributed toward a higher 
ideal of education than in the one of method. When the theory was first offered to 
the reading public many feared it as an attack upon religion ; its entrance into the field 
of education was neither feared nor desired. As was pointed out in the beginning of 
this paper, the import of the term was generally accepted by teachers as mechanical 
change, not as change resulting from the law of being. Slowly but surely the appre- 
ciation of natural law as the activity of the inherent tendencies has wrought a marked 
change in the school in the interpretation of the relation between man and nature. 
They are no longer treated as opposing forces. They are seen as two activities in the 
dynamic process of the unity called the world. It is but a short step from a concep- 
tion of man and nature as parts of the same system, to a conception of the relation 
between mind and body. The generalizations of the evolutionist are proving efficient 
forces in educational theory. They are more stimulating to teachers when they form 
the material with which the educational thinker reaches the conclusions which he 
formulates in his particular subject. The return to old methods of instruction and 
school management, the repudiation of the theories which have issued from the inves- 
tigations of biologists and psychologists have sometimes indicated that the theories 
have been found wanting because of the readiness with which they were constructed 
from a few facts. A higher degree of sensitiveness to new facts must mark the teacher 
if educational method is ever to have that flexibility and constant approach to truth 
that characterize scientific method. The rapidity with which the conceptions of a 
great mind are crystallized in educational formulas by those who accept the gospel as 
presented by the larger mind indicates the failure to be on the alert for facts that can- 
not be explained under the law as interpreted. Fluidity of mind does not mean a con- 
stant change in mental movement; it means a playing about and around everything 
that is involved in or is germane to the particular subject of thought. With an 
enlarged perception of the relation of mind and body the idea of the primary activities 
has undergone a great change. The conception of habit as an established way of 
doing something that is of use, not because it is established permanently, but because 

• : <Tompkin9, Philosophy of Teaching, pp. 5-7 

152 



Ella Flagg Young 13 



it will be useful in the effort to do new things, necessitates a right-about-face in what 
is called the training of children. 

Helpful as is a conception of the dynamic relations between mind and body in 
the development of the method of the school, it could never give that upward propul- 
sion which has come through the theories of the sociologist. In the effort to collect 
and interpret the facts in the social history of man the physical environment is neces- 
sarily analyzed, but the stress is laid upon the acts — the life of man. It is in the 
recognition of the influence of this inheritance that the social surrounding will be 
elevated and purified because it supplies those stimuli which are destined to develop or 
warp the life which begins merely with the tendencies to reach out for and react on 
stimuli. The conception of education which makes the social environment the all-com- 
prehensive factor while prospective in its aim is necessarily retrospective in its search 
for material. If mankind has made an upward march in the centuries past and in so 
doing has retained some forms of social life, has changed some and has wholly rejected 
others, then to feel the movement of intelligence is to project the progressive steps 
which have been taken in the centuries past. 

The history of education brings out in bold relief the tendency of humanity to 
establish its advances in dogmatic form. This leads us, on the one hand, to a con- 
fusion of the experience of the race in the past with the possibilities of experience for 
the individual in the present; or, on the other hand, to a rejection of the traditions 
embodied in the rich and varied life of thought and action by means of which mankind 
has acquired its social heritage, for the ideas of the present only, as embodied in the 
expressions of the limited range of thought and action of the individual. In educa- 
tional practice, the outcome of that marvelous revival of learning, that inquiry into the 
history of man's thoughts and achievements, called the Renaissance, was the set- 
ting up for study the verbal expression of the culture of Greece and Rome. The 
culture of which the Greek and Latin literatures were the embodiment was left for 
study in later years by the few who attained ripe scholarship. But again, in educa- 
tional practice, the outcome of reformations founded on the effort to begin the 
training of mind through activity with subject-matter has been the restriction of the 
survey to the few phases deemed valuable in the narrow experience of the reformer. 
The vernacular which is symbolical of the limited experiences of the reformer-teachers 
and the children rarely develops through their usage in beauty or vigor. They 
need it to express a small fraction only of the thoughts, emotions, and deeds of 
the race. 

The defects of the conservative or cultural school which in its empiricism neglects 
the study of mind in its unfolding of power in discrimination and definiteness in the 
use of the symbols of thought must disappear under the application of the method of sci- 
ence to education. The defects of the radical, or rational, school which in its individu- 
alistic trend ignores the movements of human society in the past, undergoing changes 
in its form and constitution through the action of the immutable laws of its nature, 

153 



14 Scientific Method 



must also disappear through the application of the method of science to research in the 
social heritage of the child of today. 

Education has always recognized the fact that the past is involved in a cultivated 
present ; the mistake has been that it has considered information about the past rather 
than activity in the progress of the past as fundamental. The lesson taught by evolu- 
tion — that life is movement, not rest — has been interpreted as meaning movement 
in a fixed stage of development, not as movement from simple to complex conditions. 
With this understanding the theory of the social environment as the true stimulus for 
consciousness has resulted in the attempt to project the life of the child into a social, 
ethical, and civil environment which is simply a reduced copy of the life of the present 
century. This withholds from him those simpler modes of activity which would be 
the stimuli adapted for the early years of life. For example, it begins the work in 
manual training with the perfected tools and exact geometrical designs of the skilled 
mechanic, and so in that development which should be progressive from the early 
years — as soon as the child has learned to walk and to handle things — constructive 
activity is deferred until he reaches the higher grammar grades. Nothing can more 
painfully and perfectly illustrate the failure of this idea of progression in educational 
theory than the action taken through the suggestions of leaders in education all over 
the country, action which delays manual and constructive work until children have 
reached the sixth or seventh grade. Growth from the simple to the complex, and not 
growth beginning in the complex, is the fundamental in the natural law of life. 

Although the theory of the experience of the recapitulation of the race by the 
individual has been held for centuries, yet it is within very recent years that the ele- 
ment of his activity has been recognized in the word " recapitulates." This is illustrated 
in the fact that Herbart, who first formulated the "culture epoch" theory as a funda- 
mental in education, refused to apply it to the learning of the sciences. His refusal 
to permit in education the possibility of the blundering and absurd theorizing of the 
past shows that in the main he entertained merely a logical presentation of the history 
of different peoples. Unwillingness to permit the application of the scientific method 
in the beginning of the study of science — in that term we include nature study, 
physics, chemistry, and mathematics — shows scientific method to be least regarded in 
the domain in which it originated. 

There is no subject in which there has been less satisfactory advance than in that 
of science learned in accordance with its own method. It was but yesterday that science 
gained recognition as a culture element in education. The long debate that was car- 
ried on in considering the relative titles of literature and science to rank and standing 
necessarily delayed the introduction of the study of science by the scientific method, 
and now that she and her method are established it comes about that she prefers to 
linger in the halls of the colleges and universities instead of seeking her own in 
every department of that great organization known as the school. A growing 
understanding of the method by which mind works and develops shows it to be 

154 



Ella Flagg Young 10 



the inductive method of the scientist, An acquaintanceship with nature is now 
being established between the children and the environment, with spontaneous reach- 
ing toward her as the beginning, investigation and selection as the advance, and 
assimilation, nutrition, growth, power — in short, love and knowledge of nature — as 
the culmination. 

The history of the social evolution of the race should be a history of what the 
race has done, rather than a compilation of its theories ; hence the great problem in 
educational method today is to determine the conditions under which the race has 
worked in the past and which of those conditions, if reinstated, will develop in 
consciousness a feeling of upward movement. That conception of evolution as a vital 
force in education which leaves the child a barbarian at the mercy of the rude and 
vicious forces in modern civilization has no part in educational method which is 
scientific. The rudeness of manner, the self-assertion which characterize the Ameri- 
can child are a result of his reaction to social stimuli in which social ethics are con- 
fused, in which adults are themselves pausing in the early stages of the ethical life 
and its expression through a mistaken notion that they must pause with the child. 
When Froebel said, "Let us live with the child," he did not mean the life and experi- 
ence of the adult should be overwhelmed by the child's life and experience. 

There must be thinking in the attitude of the intelligent seeker after truth if 
there is to be a clear understanding of the problem of the future, and this problem 
can be faced intelligently only as one has command of the resources and forces which 
have been evolved out of the past, and knows their natural law. To learn these things 
one must use the method of science. If the teacher as student can gain an intimate 
acquaintance with nature and humanity through the attitude of science only, then must 
the special problem, the development of the individual, be solved only by the use of 
method called in its specific application educational method. 

On every hand is a growing recognition of the possibilities of scientific method in 
education. Many individual teachers in the schools of this country are in intelligent 
sympathy with the aims and ways of scientific method as applied to education. They 
can, however, accomplish little that will be of permanent value to educational theory 
and practice, while they work in schools in which the method is hostile to the new spirit, 
or in systems of schools in which the administration is so mechanical as to 
safeguard them against that fluidity and at the same time definiteness that charac- 
terize mind in its development. 

The work of investigation carried on in schools that are facing, throughout their 
organization, the questions of education with the attitude of the scientist is valuable 
beyond compare. Not facts alone, not laws alone are sought. The facts and the laws 
of nature that explain the marvelous beauty and power of the life-process of the soul, 
and also those that belong to the world that affords nutrition to the race and the indi- 
vidual, are the material which the educational laboratory investigates. 

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